One of the main challenges in the elaboration of innovative digital tools for water management (from supply to distribution) is the need for useful data to provide water managers and operators with needed insights to perform operational and managerial decision-making procedures.
Under this necessity, there has been elaborated during the past years different open digital ecosystems coming from different water industrial communities (e.g. Open Geospatial Consortium). The elaboration and adoption of open digital structures opens the way to open water domain ecosystems, facilitating data sharing. Despite the great benefits of the open digital architectures, common decision-making tools are reaching a limit on the recommendation and discovery of efficient decision-making procedures. This has been guided by the fact of siloed based information of water domain. Consequently, there is a need to combine Nexus information to open the door to new forms of decision-making based on win-win strategies for water-related domains.
Thus, Europe is moving towards the promotion of Open Data Spaces to share data across different domains maintaining data sovereignty and privacy. Under this movement, NAIADES is contributing at two different levels:
- The project is contributing to the FIWARE foundation “Smart Data Models” working group with the generation of contextual data models for representing water information.
- The project is part of representative associations and standardization bodies to the elaboration of open digital architectures and intelligent services for water domain.
As a conclusion, water domain is moving fast towards the generation of more open and cohesive domain with the elaboration of strong links with the relate domains (energy, climate, land use, etc.). This will open the door to a broad of future innovations related to adaptation to climate change and lowering of the decarbonization at large scale.